Tips for 3-letter agencies wishing to infiltrate and subvert the SAFE Network project

I think you’d be surprised with the western intel community. I’m pretty sure they know about the project and are paying attention. David himself made comments illustrative of such interest years ago. Remember that the US Navy came up with TOR, right? Besides being comprised of fairly diverse perspectives, they may see more pros than cons in this project as the landscape of cyber-warfare evolves. Broadly labeling the intel community as against the interest of the citizens is dangerous. The CIA is a different beast than the NSA, and the NSA is still different from military intel. And even within groups, there are factions and rogue double agents. Smoke and mirrors. Oh, gosh, I never thought the day would come when I would defend the intel community! Certainly, many recent stories don’t reflect such a posture, but I think it’s temporary. There are more good than bad. With what they’re up against in terms of zero-days and hardware exploits, decentralization, encryption, and redundancy are likely to be more prioritized over software backdoors or threats to centralization. I think more bad news is to come also, so that will only highlight the positives of SAFE for them.

Someone mentioned the child porn aspect. Evil content is something that concerns me, because it can’t be stopped. We’ll have to evolve, I suppose. There are plenty of ways to stop the production of it that don’t need a backdoor, just simple analog detective work, building communities that work, etc. The dissemination of it though…well…who knows?

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Digital aspect has only been one of the ways they find out about it and it has taken good old police/detective work to break the rings and stop the production. SAFE really doesn’t change the landscape for these groups that use their own encryption networks now and obviously they won’t trust SAFE for quite a while anyhow.

Yes I almost fell off my seat. :laughing::sunglasses::grin:

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I think a lot of people are going to be surprised at what the Safe Network brings to the table in terms of hardcore anonymity and a censor-proof environment. The Tor network is no longer really trusted due to how the FBI infiltrated the Silk Road and the I2P network is too slow with too few people using it.

I won’t say what I imagine to be possible with real hardcore anonymity, and the ability to publish in a censor-proof environment … but if you think/imagine hard enough I suspect you can come up with a few things that will be really really bad for coercive monopolies and those who run/manage them.

IMO, the Safe Network is, no-joke, a big threat to all of ‘them’ … when it’s up and running. My advice for those who understand what I’m talking about and who intend to act on those ideas - keep a low profile here - as afterwards the three letter agencies will be mining this forum for leads. No Joke.

To all the alphabet-agencies out there now and in the future … it wasn’t me!! :wink:

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I think the Safe Network, which I wholeheartedly support, is a big threat to all of us as we all have something to hide or some situation we wouldn’t like everybody else to see us in, at least according to today’s social norms. There won’t only be pictures of, say, Taliban beheadings that are impossible to take down or censor. There will be pictures your little brother/sister took when when you were in the shower because he was mad at you at the time. This probably means social norms or morals will change globally with respect to e.g. nudity and sexuality.

In the US of today a picture of a president having sex with a prostitute or his secretary is a catastrophe for his career. This will change also because of SAFE, I think. Although it already seems pretty obvious the CIA were dealing drugs and weapons at least in the 80’s and e.g. the US military routinely commits horrific crimes against humanity, pictures and documents proving these things will be more readily available on the Safe Network, which could possibly lead to changes in legislation. Maybe it will lead to e.g. dealing drugs and torturing people becoming accepted again, just because it’s so obvious “they” do it.

If this thing goes live I think we are in for some HUGE changes in society.

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Not being able to bury stuff by threats or money is a game changer. How can you organise a cover up when a leak cannot be reversed?

I agree that social behaviours may change, but it may be that posting personal pictures irrevocably, will be considered more of a crime than to some place temporary or reversible. Regular detective work would likely be able to figure out who it was too.

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I’m definitely for good old regular detective work, and that may increase as well, as opposed to agents just sitting around their computers gathering data and listening in on people in general. I certainly hope the law will go after the actual producers of e.g. child porn, rather than the sick consumers of the pictures. I find it revolting even thinking and typing these words, but I think this conversation is important to have within the project of SAFE.

I doubt stuff like revenge porn and the like will be considered more of a crime if/when the pictures become irreversible. Of course I may be wrong, but I think “pictures taken in the shower” will become so common that people will get used to them and the social norms will change in this respect.

Even in today’s Internet I think it is extremely difficult to take anything offline once it has been published. Remove something from one place and it gets posted/re shared somewhere else, or has been copied by someone else. Put something in the public cloud and it is likely there for good. This article is pretty interesting.

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Yeah for the OP, most of TPTB would only learn about SAFE or other things as they actually become real, and start making actual real world trouble. That’s what the organizations spend their money and focus on. Immediate threats.

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A while a go I got a recommended video on Youtube about ‘how long does a severed head remain conscious’.
Why I got that recommendation isn’t clear (maybe because I saw a couple of ‘mousetrap monday’ videos before that).
That video wasn’t that bad and interesting from a scientific point of view. But in the comments there was a reference to a Taliban/Isis beheading on Reddit. I’m pretty sure this video is removed from Reddit by now, but it seemed it worked at that time according to the Youtube replies (I didn’t have the need to check that myself).
Conclusion: sometimes you even don’t have to look for it to encounter such videos on the current Internet.

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It could lead to decentralized forms of governance, where there is no individual to attack or take down. The benefit of blackmail or or smear campaigns would be nullified when bad actors don’t have a target. Their sensitive and compromising material becomes less valuable and puts them at risk of swarm defense responses.

Crowd-sourced detective work is already pretty rampant in the deeper corners of the internet. Large groups are uncovering details about news stories not originally published or even knowable by individual reporters. For example, they’ve found a bunch of evidence in that big limo accident from yesterday that killed 20 people. It seems a number of people in the limo worked for a semiconductor company with strong connections to Elemental, the group mentioned in that Bloomberg article about China back-dooring chips at Apple and Amazon…

Here’s another goodie which might explain what that whole supreme court mess was about:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4674689/wrap-smear

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I think it’s much less of a threat to ordinary individuals than to the entrenched elites where blackmail and “control files” are very much part of reality and being used to corrupt elected and other officials whom the public believe are acting on their behalf.

If we’re really lucky, once SAFE Network is launched, some renegade party will simply mass publish huge tranches of control files on a plethora of famous people, and in doing so, not only causing the biggest public uproar ever but also pretty much inoculating the entire world against such practices (practices = both the blackmail and the offensive behavior making blackmail viable) ever again reaching the (presumably) catastrophic dimensions they have in today’s world.

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“Well, do ya, punk?”
My bet is it starts happening this month or next.

At least we shouldn’t have much to worry about from Silicon Valley, they seem to have enough problems of their own…

https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/FBI-informant-in-terror-stings-owned-limo-in-13290392.php

You’re right, of course, maybe I should have put the word “threat” in quotation marks. But you know what I mean.

Sadly, I don’t think this will be the case. Sure, there will be an uproar - several uproars. There have been uproars about the Titanic sinking, about the documented practices in Abu Ghraib, and about the earth circling the sun or not circling the sun, and about Snowden’s revelations. But I don’t believe in any inoculation against human nature. Humans like scandals, but they also generally adapt and calm down until they find a new temporary scandal to be up in arms about.

I don’t believe people a couple of hundred years ago would have thought twice about slaughtering an animal. Now most people, at least in the West, don’t seem to know where their food comes from and frown at gutting a fish, while at the same time happily munching away at the latest sushi dish. A thousand years ago most probably felt killing another person was just fine. I believe these views or values come and go in historical circles.

Like I said, I’m a big supporter of the Safe Network. I think it’s a good thing. But I don’t believe humans as a species will become any nicer than they are now, no matter how much stuff is exposed. Society will change and different things may become acceptable or unacceptable. But there will likely always be those who have more power and those who have less. And some of those who have more power will hurt those who have less for profit.

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This is how they would do it:
https://forum.autonomi.community/t/the-underhanded-c-contest-has-begun

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Hopefully we will have a high bar (many eyes on any new code) for approving code changes down the track when the network is live.

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This is exactly the kind of alternative angle of attack which I was attempting to elicit in my starting post. Now, if we could also find something on the angle related to infiltrating and subverting the social scene of the developers or compromising individual devs, I’d be elated.

And I’m sure there are even more peculiar angles that we haven’t even identified.

My major concern, however, and it’s actually what I believe is going to happen, if something like the SAFE Network will be launched, with all the features and marvelous consequences for free speech and an end to nefarious cryptocracy, and kleptocracy and tyranny being able to ocnceal their evil operations, which we all believe it will or hope for, is that the embattled elites will then find that their only option will be to

pull the plug on the Internet…

(sure, I see people argue that that’s impossible, “it’s never gonna happen”. I disagree.)

I think that once the code is put onto the network itself and developers around the globe start working on it through the network itself, thus rendering them anonymous developers … plus (I hope) there will be some system of “developer aging” (lol) to vet the devs … then it will be quite difficult to subvert the code as it will require a consensus of devs “adult-devs” to add/modify the existing code.

On the other hand, if this isn’t taken seriously (I sure it will be as there are many here who understand the threat) and if most people just upgrade without caring how development is being handled, then problems will arise - the abc’s could and would put a lot of their people on the project as devs and they could certainly work together to sneak in “underhanded” code.

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This is also a reason why we need to be supportive of the Maidsafe team taking their time to get the code to a very high level of workability and readability before beta. As this will make it more difficult for manipulators to insert underhanded code.

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That is where a mash network can come in…

However, the hardest problem of SAFE, won’t be the technical part, but the part to convince people and get everybody on SAFE. That will probably being avoided for the major part, because governments can manipulate through the media. However, I still believe that if SAFE is technical ‘kind of impossible to break’, together we can offer, and promote a strong alternative.

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